Chapter 12: Further Growth and a New Stability

John W. Shirley became acting president of the University of Delaware in
very difficult times. Experienced and mature (just under fifty-nine) when he
took over the presidency on July 1, 1967, Shirley came to his task well-versed
in the peculiar problems of a state university, both through his own
education, crowned by a Ph.D. in English at the State University of Iowa, and
by his subsequent posts as teacher and administrator at Michigan State and
North Carolina State.

The times were difficult not only because of the student unrest that
carried over into the fall of 1967 from the events of the previous spring, but
also because the year 1967-68 marked a crisis in the feelings of the American
people about the Vietnam War. This was the year in which Lyndon Johnson
decided not to involve the armed forces further in Vietnam and in which he
also decided not to seek reelection. And at this critical time the university
was forced to cope with continued rapid growth, its undergraduate enrollment
of 6,500 in September 1967 being almost ten percent larger than at the opening
of the previous school year. A faculty turnover rate of ten percent, much as
it had been in the recent past, and an addition of over 100 new professional
members of the faculty and staff for the second year in a row meant that the
faculty was in flux, a sizable minority newly adjusting to Delaware, many
fresh from graduate study at institutions, like California and Columbia,
disrupted by student insurrection.

Soon after the fall term began a portion of the student leadership
carried its antiwar, antimilitarist feelings into an assault on the military
training requirement. They distributed leaflets on campus declaring that the
university was not obliged to make ROTC compulsory and calling for a meeting
on this issue. Their spirit was indicated by another question on the leaflets:
Do you want the University of Delaware to continue to run your life?

As a land-grant college the university was required to offer training in
military science, but it was not required to make the study compulsory. It had
done so for two reasons: first, if enrollments were not sufficiently large,
the government would not provide instructors, and then the cost of instruction
would fall to the institution, as it had before 1890; second, the university
had hitherto accepted the opinion that Harter and other presidents had
frequently voiced, that military training was of positive value to the
students in itself. The need for military training had, of course, been
generally evident at the time of the two world wars.

In 1967 the university was sufficiently large that the concern over
having an adequate number of students electing noncompulsory military training
was no longer very great; as a matter of fact, the
number desiring advanced training, to qualify for an army commission, had
recently doubled. Consequently, there was little opposition when the faculty
responded to the student demand by removing the requirement in January 1968.

But the anti-ROTC students had not been content to wait for faculty
action. On October 12, 1967, an ROTC drill was disrupted by a planned
demonstration. After a Volkswagen bus marked "flower power" gave the signal by
pulling up beside the drill field, approximately thirty cadets walked off the
field and at least as many demonstrators marched on, chanting, "The army has
made us men."

Few of the demonstrators were recognized by anyone in authority, but six
of them were, and they were suspended. The Student Government Association
promptly took action in their defense. Mass meetings were held, Acting
President Shirley's reception for the faculty was picketed, as was the home of
Vice-President Hocutt, and after one student rally a mass confession to
participation in the ROTC disruption of October 12 was tacked to a door of
Hullihen Hall.

Only thirty names were signed to the confession, a credible number of
demonstrators; however, it was generally understood to be no true confession,
but only an effort to upset the administration, which first suspended most of
the "confessors" on disciplinary probation and then relented, withdrawing the
suspensions. One of the "confessors" was Ramon Ceci, the SGA president, who
lost his office as a consequence of this action, for he resigned, along with
four other student officers, rather than appeal the disciplinary
probation.F#1

The disappearance of SDS influence in the leadership of the student
government by no means meant an end to SDS influence on campus. The unofficial
organ of this group was a publication called Heterodoxical Voice, printed
commercially but edited from an office in the headquarters of the Presbyterian
campus ministry on Orchard Road. The spirit of rebellion, Delaware-style
(which means comparatively low-keyed), was abroad. Graffiti, some radical and
some obscene, appeared on the temporary framework erected to shield campus
building operations, such as the large addition to Hullihen Hall that was
under way. A part-time student burned his draft card, drugs appeared on
campus, as elsewhere in teenage America, and a drug raid was conducted on
Brown Hall. Obscene leaflets were distributed condemning authorities.
Demonstrators briefly occupied Hullihen Hall corridors. In May an all-night
sit-in was held at the Student Center in sympathy with students at Delaware
State College, which had been closed by Governor Terry.F#2

Such events were the talk of the campus, of course, but they involved
only a minority of the students. For the majority, life went on as usual,
though the dress code, revised by the student government, was in practice
abandoned since it was not compulsory; other restrictions were also eased. As
Shirley explained to the trustees, students wanted (1) elimination of all
dormitory regulations that restricted women more than men; (2) permission to
entertain visitors of either sex in their rooms at all hours; and (3)
liberalization of all regulations pertaining to extracurricular affairs,
including the invitation of speakers to the campus. If the university was to
maintain no control over living conditions, he wondered whether it had any
duty to provide residential facilities.F#3 (All three of the
student demands were granted in a short time, though not in the 1967-68 school
year.)

Growth was so rapid that outside experts, the firm of Sasaki, Dawson,
and DeMay, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was called in to help the university's
staff develop a long-range master plan for the campus. Construction was begun
on a new dormitory-dining hall complex (the future Pencader Hall) on land
given by William Winder Laird beside New London Road, and other buildings were
planned for the block facing the campus across College Avenue between Delaware
Avenue and Amstel. As the Willard Hall Education Building was being completed,
plans were laid for McDowell Hall to house the College of Nursing, also north
of Main Street and west of North College Avenue.

One novelty was the establishment of a student radio station. William
Skold, '67, developed a plan for a station which he presented to the SGA in
1966. It took time for approval, including that of the trustees, to be
secured, and still more time for funds to be raised. Acting President Shirley
allocated $16,000 for the station in 1968 and the SGA provided another $7,000,
which permitted the purchase of twenty-seven transmitters that were placed
around the campus to permit the reception of closed-circuit broadcasting. The
first broadcast by WHEN, as the station was called, was on October 21, 1968,
and the first studio was in East Hall, the former Newark Armory, where the
Instructional Resources Center had its headquarters.F#4

Another innovation was the creation of ten H. Rodney Sharp merit
scholarships, approved by the trustees on June 8, 1968. Of varying amounts,
they were to be awarded each year to ten entering freshmen on the basis of
merit and regardless of sex, residence, or field of study. They could be
renewed for a total of four years and were supported by an allocation of funds
from the Sharp endowment in an effort to attract especially promising
undergraduates.

Two days after the trustees approved this allocation from the funds he
had made available, Rodney Sharp died on shipboard returning from a trip to
Europe. When he came to campus in 1896 as a sixteen-year-old freshman admitted
on probation from Lewes, he was surely not the most promising undergraduate.
When he died in 1968 it was acknowledged that no one in the history of
Delaware and very few persons in the history of the United States had ever
done so much for a university.

As had been done after Carlson's resignation seventeen years earlier,
the trustees in 1967 set up a search committee of their own members and an
advisory committee from the faculty to seek a replacement for John Perkins.
Walter J. Beadle headed the first committee, and Edward H. Rosenberry
(English) was chairman of the second. After screening more than 200 names of
potential candidates and giving careful consideration to the credentials of
several score, their choice was announced in May 1968 to be Edward Arthur
Trabant, the forty-eight-year-old vice-president for academic affairs at the
Georgia Institute of Technology.

E.A. Trabant, as he normally signed his name, had a somewhat broader
university background than his immediate predecessors in the presidency,
Carlson and Perkins, who were both almost entirely limited in their previous
experience to large midwestern state universities--Carlson to Michigan and
Minnesota, and Perkins to
Michigan, except for a very short time at Rochester. Trabant had done his
undergraduate work at Occidental College, a small liberal arts school in a
suburb of Los Angeles, and then had taken a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at
one of the two outstanding schools of its kind in the nation, the California
Institute of Technology. His first professional appointment had been at Purdue
University, and from Purdue, where he had become assistant dean of the
graduate school in 1956, he moved in 1960, to Buffalo as dean of the
engineering school, and then, in 1966, to Georgia Tech.

Trabant took over the presidency at Delaware on July 1, 1968, exactly
one year after John Perkins left the office. At his first public appearance on
campus, the new president called on the students, the faculty, and the
administration to join together in creating a new "Community Design" for the
university, with a structure recognizing the importance of the individual and
providing the means for individual participation in and determination of the
details of the design.

The working out of details for each unit of the university--division,
department, or college--extended over several years; The Decade Ahead: The
Report of the Community Design Planning Commission was published by the
university in two volumes in 1971. One by-product of the labor this report
occasioned that was hardly accidental was the opportunity given to every group
within the university to participate. This was probably of very great
significance in view of the internal situation--a student body that included
many students disaffected and in some degree rebellious toward the state of
affairs, particularly in view of the chance that the men might be called out
to fight far away in a very unpopular war; and a faculty that was one-fourth
completely new in the fall of 1968 and that was to some degree alienated,
either by the same causes affecting the students or by the authoritarian
administration that had recently ended. To get a measure of cooperative
endeavor on a disturbed campus was a first priority at Delaware, and the new
president saw this problem and attacked it immediately.

He referred to this need in his inaugural address, which was not given
until May 17, 1969. In this speech, Trabant quoted from a letter warning him
that his task required him to be more of a manager than an educator; that it
involved working with many groups--trustees, governor and legislators,
faculty, and students; that he should allow increased faculty and student
representation in running the university, while preserving its autonomy
against outside pressures and still displaying independence and integrity in
upholding his own beliefs. "Colleges around the country are time bombs, the
fuses...lit," the writer concluded. "At Delaware we don't need a demolition
expert to dismantle the bombs. What we need is someone who, because of his
fairness and his willingness to make the University a better place by allowing
all parties to contribute, will keep the bomb from being made in the first
place."

"I accept these tenets and responsibilities," declared the new
president.F#5 Many subsequent developments in his administration showed that
the pledge was taken seriously.

The reference to bombs was not mere rhetoric. In September 1968 a
Molotov cocktail had exploded in a uniform storage room of the
ROTC building, the old Mechanical Hall. It did limited damage, but soon campus
life was disturbed at least as much as in the previous year by repercussions
of the October 1967 interruption of the ROTC drill. Three faculty members had
apparently participated in that disruption. One had left in the summer of 1968
but the two who remained, Albert E. Myers (psychology) and Robert J. Bresler
(political science), received notice in the following October that their
contracts would not be renewed.

Decisions about the renewal of contracts of nontenured faculty normally
originate with departmental action, and such was apparently the procedure in
these cases, but students were suspicious. It was said that the administration
flew one political scientist home from research leave in Europe to assure a
departmental vote against Bresler's retention. It was charged by some students
that members of this department were told their desire for support in
establishing a doctoral program would be viewed favorably only if Bresler were
let go. It is impossible to analyze motives of the professors making this
decision, as with any decision affecting tenure in a university. A faculty
review committee that considered the Bresler-Myers case refused to recommend
any reversal of the decision not to renew their contracts, and Bresler and
Myers were forced to leave at the end of the year despite student petitions,
editorials in the Review, "teach-ins," rallies, and even brief student
strikes. Bresler himself broke up a sleep-in at the Student Center in December
1968, arriving there shortly after midnight when, it was said, 300 students
were gathered within the building and possibly 200 more were outside. He
persuaded them to leave but many marched to the president's house and
demonstrated outside it until 2:30 A.M.F#6

While committees, including student members, were getting to work on
various aspects of the community design he had called for, President Trabant
took the initiative in approaching another campus problem. In the fall of
1968, soon after taking office, he called Frank Scarpitti, of the sociology
department, to his office and asked him to be chairman of a committee to
consider and make recommendations for the improvement of the condition of
minorities (primarily blacks) at the university. Scarpitti accepted, the
committee was set up with students, including whites, blacks, and an Asian
among the members, and after many meetings through the winter months, a report
was presented to Trabant in March 1969, including rather lengthy
recommendations.

The report, known thereafter as the Scarpitti Report, suggested that the
needs of minorities on the campus had received insufficient attention and
proposed the recruitment of additional minority faculty and students, the
establishment of a cultural center for minorities, and the introduction of
additional courses on minority problems and achievements. In time, all of the
major recommendations were adopted, but not until after charges of neglect and
racism were made.F#7

A hullabaloo arose early in 1970 after the faculty had accepted a
recommendation from the joint faculty-trustee committee on honorary degrees to
award a degree to Charles L. Terry, Jr., who had been governor from 1965 to
1969. As a former chief justice of the state supreme court as well as
governor, Terry had a distinguished career, and the university had frequently
awarded honorary degrees to
Delawareans who held these positions. But Terry had become anathema with much
of the black community for his stern repression of the rioting that had
followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He had ordered the
National Guard mobilized to patrol the black neighborhoods of Wilmington in
the spring of 1968 and had kept them there until the end of his term in
January 1969, despite requests of the mayor that they be withdrawn and despite
one fatal shooting of a black by a guardsman. He had also forced Delaware
State College to close before its term ended because of riots there in May
1968.

These actions cost Terry black support in the fall of 1968, but they may
also have won him votes. He did lose a bid for reelection that fall, though it
is possible that had he not been incapacitated by illness during the campaign
he might have been reelected. At any rate, discovery that the faculty had
voted him an honorary degree precipitated an uproar in which some faculty
members--possibly some who had not attended the meeting at which the degree
was approved--joined the black students and others in protesting the award.
Fortunately for the peace of the campus, Terry, made aware of the controversy,
declined the degree and avoided the possibility of an unpleasant
demonstration.F#8

Such a demonstration did occur on May 7, 1970, when a group of blacks
from an organization called the Black Student Union interrupted the ceremonies
on Honors Day, a day when various student awards are announced, including
membership in honorary societies. A temporary stage had been set up before the
north entrance to Memorial Hall and an audience of faculty, students, parents,
and friends was seated on the mall when a group of black students invaded the
platform and seized the microphone to demonstrate their insistence that the
university augment a recommendation made in the Scarpitti Report calling for
the hiring of a professor of Afro-American studies.

Actually it was not an easy matter to acquire a trained scholar in this
hitherto neglected field. Two efforts that the university made to fill this
position turned out unhappily. The first appointee was an African scholar; the
black students soon complained that his interests were far from theirs, that
he had little understanding of the experience of blacks in America. Student
representatives served on the committee that chose the second director, a
woman, but soon students were complaining that they could seldom see her. It
was learned that she also held another job at some distance away, and she left
after one term, to general satisfaction. The third head of the program, James
E. Newton, turned out to be a happy choice. Newton, an accomplished artist,
had been serving as an assistant professor in education; after he assumed
direction of the program in black American studies, it acquired stability and
respectability.F#9

Another recommendation of the Scarpitti Report, establishment of a
minorities center, was finally carried out in 1976, when a residence on South
College Avenue was converted to use for this purpose. A resident adviser was
appointed to counsel black students, who, according to a paper written by one
of them, needed longer in adjusting themselves to university life than the
average student. Besides the Black Student Union, formed in 1968, black
students also organized other societies, including fraternities, sororities,
and special interest groups, like one formed of black engineering
students.F#10

When the first black students were admitted to the university in 1948,
as previously mentioned, no records were kept that identified the race of any
student, and the same practice was followed after the 1950 decision in the
Parker case that opened the university completely to all Delaware residents.
Briefly, black students from out-of-state, to whom the 1950 decision did not
apply, were denied admission, but this position was soon quietly abandoned.
Passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 pressed the states, through its Title
VI, to demonstrate the desegregation of their educational systems, including
higher education.

The Scarpitti Report had called on the university to see that there was
black representation on the board of trustees, in the administration, and on
the faculty. Governor Russell Peterson, Terry's successor, appointed the first
black, Mrs. Arva Jackson, to the board in 1969, and a second black, Luna I.
Mishoe (the president of Delaware State), was added by election of the board
later in the same year. A number of blacks were appointed to professional
staff positions, but no high administrative post went to a black until the
appointment of L. Eudora Pettigrew as associate provost for instruction in
1981. The addition of black faculty was difficult because relatively few
blacks were qualified for such positions, and for those who were, there was
considerable competition among universities. Probably the first black
appointed to a full professorship at Delaware was Leroy B. Allen, a former
college president, who became a professor in the College of Education in
1968.

Although the SDS ceased to be recognized as a legitimate student
organization after September 1969 and gradually lost its importance as a
spearhead of dissent on campus, student demands and student unrest still
absorbed much attention on the campus through the 1969-70 school year.

Student organizations united in pressing for adoption of a statement
regarding student rights that had been drawn up almost two years earlier. The
students specifically asked for freedom from any residence restrictions as
well as from restrictions on the use and possession of alcohol by those over
twenty-one. They wanted the right to establish rules for their own government
in living units on campus and the power to allocate the use of money collected
by the university as an activities fee. They also wanted a voice in the making
of university policies, by representation on trustee committees and by
participation in departmental decisions.

A modified version of their request was granted by the faculty in
January 1970. Of course, the faculty could not make rules regarding the board
of trustees, but the latter body, probably influenced by the appearance,
though peaceful, of about 1,000 students at its December meeting, granted
students the right to representation at its sessions and as observers on some
of its committees. In 1978 the board began the practice of electing a very
recent graduate to fill membership on the board for a term of one year.
Students were added to many departmental and faculty committees, though they
were not given the right of voting on such matters as promotion and tenure.

A new student government organization was given a large measure of financial
independence, and residence rules were greatly
liberalized. Coed dorms became the norm rather than the exception.
Restrictions on the use of alcohol were largely removed for those of legal
age. The effect of these changes in student regulations was to abolish most of
the evidences of paternalism on the part of the university.

As hostilities continued in Vietnam, antiwar sentiments on campus
remained strong and were voiced in monthly student rallies, or "moratoria," as
the SGA called these meetings, which were intended to supplant all other
student activities. When the first moratorium was held in October 1969 it
featured speeches by members of the faculty and was followed by a large
candlelight procession, in which the Review estimated that 1,700 students
participated.

Interest in the monthly moratoria faded in the winter of 1969-70, but in
May the American invasion of Cambodia aroused the campus to feverish
excitement again. A student "strike for peace" was declared on many campuses
nationwide in an effort to bring pressure on the Nixon administration to
withdraw from the war. The SGA voted for a strike and a mob of students
gathered outside a faculty senate meeting in hope of winning support.

Faculty members varied in opinion from a desire to continue classes as
usual to an insistence on joining with students in closing the university.
News of the death of four students, shot by the Ohio National Guard during a
demonstration at Kent State University on May 4, further inflamed the
situation. The faculty decided, however, on a compromise measure; it
recommended (but did not demand) a two-day moratorium on class instruction,
hoping that this would be long enough to let passions cool and classes
proceed.

Trabant wired President Nixon, urging a peaceful end to hostilities: "I
urge you to consider all possible means to bring a peaceful end as soon as
possible to U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia. Immediate action on
your part will do much to stem the alienation of American youth and its
resulting possible dangers to our society."

Around-the-clock activities of student remonstrants took place at the
Student Center, with occasional demonstrations on other parts of the campus,
as when a crowd of students marched on the ROTC headquarters demanding that
the military leave the campus, or when the aforementioned outbreak by the
Black Student Union interrupted the Honors Day ceremony.F#11

Trabant refused to be provoked into any irrational response by these
events. When students held a candlelight procession on Sunday night, May 10,
in honor of the slain Kent State students, the president and Mrs. Trabant,
along with Stuart Sharkey, then director of residence, joined the procession,
which moved from the Student Center to Old College and then, after three
minutes of silent reflection, to Memorial Hall.

When the two-day moratorium permitted by faculty action had expired,
many students were quite unwilling to return to classes. To avoid a
confrontation with students already partly alienated by events and yet allow
classes to resume for the short time remaining in the term, the faculty agreed
that those students wishing to withdraw from classes could do so and postpone
their final examinations until late in the summer if their professors agreed.
The majority of
students returned to classes, but some began a house-to-house canvass to
arouse antiwar sympathy; they also visited shopping centers, accompanied by a
few sympathetic professors, on what they deemed an educational mission.

Not everyone was pleased by the deep concern these students showed for
American policy. One legislator suggested punitive action against the
university for condoning the student moratorium; the students thought of what
they were doing as a strike against education as usual, but the word
moratorium was preferred by the faculty as a euphemism that would be less
likely to inflame feelings. Fortunately for the university, Governor Russell
Peterson stifled an imminent move to cut off funds from the university unless
the strike, or moratorium, was suspended.F#12

When classes resumed in the fall of 1970 the campus was relatively
quiet. Now an important issue was ecology, the preservation of the
environment. The College of Agricultural Sciences showed particular interest
and began offering courses in this subject. Students complained of prices at
the University Bookstore, which was torn between a desire to accommodate
students and hesitation to provoke complaints of unfair competition from
private booksellers. The drug culture had influenced college-age youth (as it
had teenagers in high schools, too) to such a degree that the Health Center
arranged to provide counsel on a twenty-four-hour basis.

The persisting war in Vietnam was not forgotten, and there were
occasional antiwar rallies and memorial observations. A "Free University" was
started in April 1971 with eleven noncredit courses taught by faculty and
students on the model of an existing extracurricular program offered at the
University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere. (Eventually this program became
known as "Di-Versity.") The women's liberation movement sparked a protest
against a local beauty pageant, and in the fall of 1970, students protested
against what they claimed was the irrelevance of choosing a homecoming queen
by nominating and electing a chicken, to the discomfiture of alumni accustomed
to enjoying the crowning of the queen at halftime during a football game.

Gradually the protest movement abated on the Delaware campus as it did
across the nation. The high intensity of feeling that had marked it was not
sustained, especially after the military draft became less threatening and the
national administration made clear its desire to withdraw from Vietnam. Along
with evidence of indulgence in alcohol, drugs, and a freer sex life than ever
before, students found new sources of relief from the stress of studies;
"streaking," for example, became in the early seventies the successor of the
panty raids of the early sixties.

Fraternities, which had dominated social life on campus in the 1920s and
1930s, increased in numbers in the sixties and seventies but became
proportionately less important, even though a majority of students now resided
in Newark, whereas a majority had commuted before the Second World War.
Sororities, once they were permitted on campus, also acquired houses, but
student organizations were generally based in the Student Center, though a
special center for commuters was set up in the old Presbyterian Church on Main
Street, which became known as Daugherty Hall.

When first constructed, the Student Center was, as intended, a community
center for the university as a whole, and it retained some of that function.
But increasingly, administration and faculty needs began to crowd its
facilities, and students protested the use of the building for many
conferences and meetings that held no direct interest for them. This problem
was relieved with the construction in 1972 of the John M. Clayton conference
center on the new north campus.

Clayton Hall, as it was generally called, furnished a new home for the
Division of University Extension (renamed Continuing Education in 1970). This
division, directed by John A. Murray after 1962, offered a program through the
state in which it was possible, after 1970, to take a baccalaureate degree
without ever attending regular classes on campus. The most popular site for
continuing education classes, aside from the campus itself, was the property
acquired on the edge of Wilmington in 1969-70, which consisted of two
buildings, Goodstay and Wilcastle. The former was the gift of Ellen du Pont
Wheelwright and the latter was the former clubhouse of the Wilmington Country
Club, purchased by the university for classroom use.

Clayton Hall soon proved its worth as a conference center, not just for
the university, but for the state. (Goodstay, a smaller but historic building,
was also used for conferences and housed a notable collection of Lincolniana
assembled by the Lincoln Club of Wilmington.) The north campus came alive in
the early seventies after the construction of Clayton Hall and two dormitory
complexes, the Pencader dormitories and the twin high-rise Christiana Towers,
completed in 1972. With dormitories, classrooms, and other student facilities
now spread from the north campus, beyond New London Road, to the athletic
complex surrounding the Delaware Field House, well below the Conrail tracks,
it was necessary to establish a free bus service not only to help resident
students reach their classes but also so that parking lots on the fringe of
the campus could be utilized by commuters.

No development on campus in the late 1960s and 1970s was so striking as
the growth in the size of the university. An institution that never enrolled
as many as 1,000 students before the Second World War had grown to almost
6,000 undergraduates in 1966-67, the last year of John Perkins's
administration. This number rose to 6,500 in the fall of 1968, double what it
had been just four years earlier, and then for four years the enrollment grew
by more than ten percent each year over the previous year's total. So large
was the increase in 1970 that only seventeen percent of new students were
admitted from out of state, instead of the twenty-five percent that had become
customary. In 1971 it became necessary to advise some Delaware students to
enter through the parallel program, and in 1973 some students seeking
readmission were deferred until spring.

Through these years the percentage of women in the undergraduate student
body was growing: in 1969 there were more women than men in the freshman class
for the first time since the war and in 1975 the total number of women
undergraduates on campus surpassed the number of men.

After the undergraduate enrollment reached 12,577 in 1974 there were too
few rooms on campus to satisfy demand, and though the
university as a temporary expedient rented some space in local apartment
houses and motels from time to time, it announced that it did not intend to
build any more dormitories. John Perkins had been glad to see enrollments rise
because he felt greater numbers would allow the university to function more
efficiently, but in the 1970s the trustees came to feel that there were limits
to the expansion desirable on the Newark campus. A commissioned study of the
situation by the John Carl Warnecke Associates was reviewed in 1971 by a
special advisory committee on future physical growth, chaired by Samuel
Lenher, a retired Du Pont Company vice-president. They agreed that growth on
the Newark campus should not be allowed to exceed 15,000 undergraduates, or a
total of 18,300 students; when that number was reached consideration should be
given to developing a second campus.F#13

By the mid-1970s, however, the rate of growth at Delaware, as in most
universities, slackened. While enrollments did not fall, as in some other
schools, the chart of this growth showed a plateau after the number passed
13,000 in 1976. Major reasons that the growth suddenly slowed were the
precipitous fall in the birth rate, the availability of alternate
institutions, such as Delaware Tech and some small private colleges (Wesley,
Wilmington, Goldey-Beacom, and the Delaware campus of Widener University), and
the decline in the rate of population growth in the State of Delaware. In the
1950s the State of Delaware had grown by 40.3 percent, by far the highest rate
since statistics were kept; in the 1960s its rate of growth was 22.8 percent,
the second highest figure and well beyond the national growth rate of 13.3
percent. In the 1970s, however, the growth rate plummeted to 8.4 percent, the
smallest growth since the 1920s, and, with that exception, the smallest growth
rate for over a hundred years. As a result of all of these developments, talk
of the need of a second campus proved entirely premature.

Among the means adopted to allay student dissatisfaction was the
establishment by Trabant in his first year of a consultative undergraduate
student cabinet and a similar graduate student cabinet--obviously efforts to
widen participation in policy formulation. In the next year the Office of
Student Affairs was reorganized under the supervision of John E. Worthen, who
had come to Delaware in 1963 as director of the counseling and testing office,
had become assistant provost, and then, in 1969, vice-president for student
affairs. John E. Hocutt, who previously had this responsibility, was shifted
to vice-president for administrative services.

The new dean of students was Raymond Eddy, whose office helped effect a
reorganization of the student government, mentioned earlier, intended to fit
the expanded university. College councils were set up in 1972 and the central
unifying body came to be called the University of Delaware Coordinating
Council (UDCC)--changed to the Delaware Undergraduate Student Congress (DUSC)
in 1979. By 1972 there were fifty-five residence halls on campus and a number
of special interest houses, like the Maison Francaise and the Deutsches Haus.

Student pressure helped bring about a liberalization of the curriculum
with the support of the faculty undergraduate studies committee,
which declared "that the student should be able to design a rich academic
program as free from specific requirements as possible."F#14 The faculty voted
in October 1971 to remove the physical education requirement and the General
Assembly was soon persuaded to change the requirement of a course in the
history and government of Delaware. In place of the latter one-credit-hour
course, which had become far more of a problem to give to several thousand
students a year than when it had been instituted for less than a hundred, the
history department introduced a more demanding three-credit-hour course. State
law still required a course in this subject to be taken by all aspiring
elementary teachers and by those students preparing to teach the social
studies in secondary schools; a much larger part of the very sizable
enrollment in this course, however, came from those who chose it
voluntarily.

Nor was physical education neglected on campus when the required course
was abolished. An ice rink and an outdoor pool were built near the Delaware
Field House in 1970. A very active intramural athletic program was set up,
centering around the old Women's Gym (now renamed the Hartshorn Gymnasium) and
especially the Carpenter Sports Building. Swimming pools, weight rooms, and
basketball courts, as well as handball and squash courts, were available
indoors, and the Carpenter Sports Building had laboratories for research in
the physiology of exercise and the biomechanical analysis of sports.
Intramural councils for men and women helped supervise competition in various
sports; it was said that over half of the male undergraduates competed in some
phase of the intramural program. The emphasis placed on this phase of
university life was revealed when the physical education division became the
College of Physical Education, Athletics and Recreation, the eighth
undergraduate college, in 1980.

Besides the effect of student pressure on changes in the requirements
for physical education and Delaware history, there was a weakening of some of
the general education requirements, especially of those for the B.A. degree in
arts and science. One change, the reduction of the required freshman
composition course from two terms to one, was encouraged by the difficulty of
finding qualified teachers willing to take on a large batch of freshman themes
rather than because of student desires. Other curricular changes weakening
general education requirements were adopted by the faculty with astonishingly
little consideration or loss of time considering the long deliberations that
had attended formulation of the Day Committee's proposals for curriculum
revision in the 1940s. Also a Bachelor of Arts degree in liberal studies was
instituted that allowed particular freedom in course selection in the arts and
science college; similar freedom was allowed to superior students, who were
named Dean's Scholars.

A calendar revision in 1970 provided for the fall term to conclude
before Christmas and allowed time between terms for a voluntary two-week
program called Winterim. In the beginning, Winterim was devoted to innovative
courses or projects for which credit was given but no grades, but after a few
years it developed into a five-week session that was the winter equivalent of
summer school, and more popular than the latter. In 1976, under the direction
of Donald Harward
(philosophy), a two-year honors program was instituted in Dover, using the
facilities of Wesley College, but with university faculty, along with a few
teachers hired just for this program. The students admitted to it had superior
records and tested very well on national examinations but had completed only
the junior year in high school.

Out of concern for a charter requirement that the university not be
conducted for partisan or sectarian advantage, the administration in 1966 had
forbidden opposing candidates for Congress from speaking on campus; student
protests, however, caused the ban to be lifted very quickly. Similarly, the
university sought to forbid religious meetings on campus, but in 1973 its
attempt to prevent Mass from being celebrated in one of the dorms at the
request of Catholic students led to a lawsuit that the university lost.

Most religious meetings, however, were held off-campus. The Catholics
established the St. Thomas More Oratory (originally called the Newman Center)
on Lovett Avenue. Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists, with some help
from other Protestant groups, operated the United Campus Ministry on Orchard
Road. Lutherans had their own campus mission, as did Jews. At least two
fundamentalist groups were organized among the students.

The new story in intercollegiate athletics in the Trabant era was the
opening of these activities to women. In 1968 a group of faculty and students
won approval of the Athletic Governing Board to introduce in the following
year an experimental program in intercollegiate competition for women in three
sports--basketball,
field hockey, and swimming. The program was regarded as a success and was
gradually expanded to include volleyball, tennis, softball, and lacrosse by
the end of the decade.

As a result of a 1972 federal statute forbidding discrimination against
women in any federally funded institution, two women members were added to the
Athletic Governing Board and in 1975 the facilities of the Delaware Field
House were opened to members of women's varsity teams. In the following year,
1976, financial aid was approved for women athletes as an aid to recruiting.
Several women's teams have compiled outstanding records, including the
swimming team, the 1978 field hockey team, which was runner-up to the champion
in a national competition, and especially the lacrosse team. The women's
lacrosse team surpassed the achievement of any other Delaware team in
intercollegiate competition by winning the national championship in the
highest division of competition in 1983--after previously winning two national
titles in Division II.F#15

Men's lacrosse teams have also been outstanding in recent years, winning
the East Coast Conference championship ten times in thirteen seasons. Coached
since 1965 by Robert Hannah, the baseball team won more victories in that
period (over 400) than any other Delaware team. With only one losing season,
it regularly rated among the top college teams in the Northeast. Dallas Green,
a former Delaware pitcher, though from before Hannah's time, won fame as
manager of the world champion Philadelphia Phillies of 1980.

The football team, coached by Harold (Tubby) Raymond from 1966, kept up
or even improved on the excellent records set by teams under the two previous
coaches, Bill Murray and Dave Nelson. Three
times--in 1971, 1972, and 1979--it was judged the best team in the nation in
its division, and it won the Lambert Cup, the emblem of East Coast supremacy,
many more times than any other team in its class. Delaware's football record
was so good that the team had scheduling problems; many schools that should
have been natural rivals for Delaware were hesitant to take on the Fighting
Blue Hens. (The name was an adaptation of "blue hen's chickens," a title
proudly remembered by Delawareans after it was applied to the gallant Delaware
Revolutionary soldiers, who were said to have fought like gamecocks in the
southern campaign.) Delaware, on the other hand, did not want to get involved
in the expensive competition of Division I football teams, such as Penn State,
Pittsburgh, and Maryland, which would have required a large stadium and a
larger attendance than a university serving a state of less than 600,000
people would be expected to attract.

Like the students, the faculty reorganized itself in the early 1970s.
Recognizing that it was now too large--there were about 550 faculty members in
1970--to carry on its business efficiently en masse, the faculty approved the
establishment of a representative body, the University Senate, which met for
the first time on March 16, 1970. Ex officio membership was provided for the
university president and the other chief officers of the administration, and
two seats each were reserved for representatives of the undergraduate and
graduate student bodies serving one-year terms. The remaining senators were
elected for two-year terms from the various departments and colleges. The
senators choose their own officers annually; the first president was Jon H.
Olson (chemical engineering).

Although the senate has full power to act, it could be overruled by a
full faculty meeting, but in practice this is very unlikely. The faculty does
meet twice each year and hears reports from the university president and other
officers and from its senate president, but it is kept informed of senate
affairs by regular circulation of agenda and minutes, including accounts of
the senate committees. The rather sparse attendance at faculty meetings
suggests widespread satisfaction with the senate's conduct of affairs.
Although originally there was a certain amount of friction between the senate
and the university administration, and perhaps even a degree of hostility at
least on the part of the senate, which once voted a lack of confidence in the
president, the scope of senate authority was soon established and the
relationship between faculty and administration became generally harmonious.
Through the senate the faculty performs the tasks relating to university
affairs assigned to it by the board of trustees, such as determination of
curricular requirements.

At the same time that the senate was set up, as an organ to aid
efficient performance of these tasks, many members of the faculty felt that
further organization was needed to enhance their bargaining position in
relation to salaries, working conditions, and the like. A revision of state
laws had recently permitted teachers to join together for collective
bargaining, and most of the public school teachers had, as a consequence,
empowered either the Delaware State Education Association, which was the local
affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA), or the American
Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the AFL-CIO labor union, to represent
them--the majority belonging to the former group.

Both of these organizations sought to organize the faculty at the
university, and so did a third organization, the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP), already represented on campus for about fifty
years but without bargaining powers. On its part, the university
administration, acting through a vice-president for employee relations,
William Jones, sought to persuade faculty that they would be better off and
more professional in handling their contractual relations individually rather
than by setting up an adversarial relationship and bargaining collectively
like industrial employees. The NEA dropped out of the contest early; its
history and reputation were as a school teachers' organization, whereas the
AAUP was the traditional organization of college professors. The AFT argued
that it had experience in collective bargaining and could bring valuable
support to the professors in time of need (financial, political, or other)
through its connection with organized labor.

Both the administration arguments, probably phrased by Jones, and the
AFT arguments failed to convince a majority of the faculty, who voted in May
1972 to be represented by their traditional organization, the AAUP. Whatever
it lacked in experience in collective bargaining, it seemed to make up for by
its understanding of the professional problems and ambitions of professors.

Perhaps it was less surprising that the professors preferred the AAUP to
the AFT than that they voted for any collective bargaining at all.
Organization was, of course, popular at this time. The several hundreds of
hourly workers at the university in food services, housing, and the like had
organized in 1966 as a local of the American Federation of State, County, and
Municipal Employees. An attempt to organize the large salaried and
professional staff failed when a vote was taken.F#16

Part of the reason for the decision of the faculty was probably based on
faculty experience during the authoritarian administration of John Perkins.
Perkins viewed administration of universities through faculty committees with
skepticism; administrators should administer, he thought, and scholars should
be freed of distraction from their study and teaching. Some faculty resented
their exclusion from responsibilities in university governance; establishment
of a faculty senate might have helped restore their sense of participation,
but the senate was still new when the vote on collective bargaining was
taken.

Much of the faculty was new, too; the addition of approximately 100 new
faculty members noted in 1966 and 1967 became the norm through the next five
years. The youth and low rank of many of these new faculty members may have
led them to be suspicious of the administration and also of the top-ranking
professors. Furthermore, these young professors had generally come through
college and graduate school in a time of student unrest, when they may have
been influenced at an impressionable age to view established authority with
hostility. Possibly by 1972 some young faculty members saw that the seller's
market for scholars was about to end; as jobs became less plentiful,
professors could no longer win concessions by threatening to move elsewhere
and therefore collective bargaining might seem in order.F#17

Relations between the AAUP and the university administration were
abrasive at first but improved as time went by, particularly after a former
member of the faculty, C. Harold Brown, succeeded Jones as vice-president for
personnel and employee relations and after the AAUP began to call in
professional assistance in bargaining sessions.

Faculty litigiousness, born out of the dissenting spirit of the times,
cost the university dearly on several occasions. Dismissal of a professor,
usually through failure to renew the contract of nontenured faculty, was not
always accepted without a struggle by the person involved. Several persons
took their grievances to court; others threatened to but waged their struggle
wholly within the grievance and appeal systems existing in the university. In
any case, these quarrels were costly in time if not directly in money. The
university lost none of the cases that went to court except one; a professor
from the theatre department won a considerable cash settlement by challenging
the administration for dismissing him after he had declared himself a
homosexual.

As in the case of the students, a demand arose from elements in the
faculty for more direct access than existed to the board of trustees. Governor
Sherman W. Tribbitt responded to this feeling in 1976 by appointing Shien-Biau
Woo (physics), who had been president of the local AAUP chapter, to the board.
Apparently this was the beginning of a custom of having a faculty member on
the board, for at the conclusion of Woo's term Governor Pierre S. du Pont IV
appointed Robert L. Pigford (chemical engineering) as Woo's successor.

The faculty vote for collective bargaining in May 1972 apparently helped
occasion a change in the presidency of the board of trustees. Justice Tunnell,
who had been president or chairman of the board (this title was changed in
1970) since 1962, stepped down, relinquishing the place to an older man,
Samuel Lenher, a member of the board since 1963 and also president of the
University of Delaware Research Foundation from 1955 to 1966.

According to a newspaper report of an interview with Lenher when he
resigned the chairmanship ten years later, he had accepted the post
reluctantly because as a former manager of the Du Pont Company's large
Chambers Works and through other responsibilities with Du Pont he was the one
trustee who had extensive experience with unions. "I felt," he was quoted as
telling the reporter, "if I accepted the nomination it would be a signal to
the faculty and the union that they would be confronted with real opposition
to the extension of their power into university governance."F#18

Lenher had the advantage of a considerable background in higher
education. He was the son of a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin,
where he took his undergraduate degree in 1924. He received his doctorate two
years later at London and had postdoctoral fellowships in chemistry at Berlin
and at Berkeley in 1927 and 1928. Besides his industrial experience with Du
Pont, he was a trustee of the Johns Hopkins University and of the Marine
Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Lenher had intended to serve as chairman of the board for only a short
time, but a succession of problems caused him to stay on until
1982, when he was seventy-seven. His successor, J. Bruce Bredin, was a native
Delawarean and the nephew, by manage, of Pierre du Pont and Rodney Sharp. He
had been a trustee of the university since 1957 and had also served on the
governing board of William and Mary and of Sweet Briar College.

The most important administrative appointment on campus in this period
was the selection, in 1972, the year in which Samuel Lenher became board
chairman, of L. Leon Campbell as provost and vice-president for academic
affairs. Succeeding John Shirley, Campbell, a microbiologist educated at the
University of Texas, came to Delaware after an academic career spent at
California, Washington State, Western Reserve, and Illinois, where he was
director of the School of Life Sciences. As the fourth provost in Delaware's
history (the fifth if a period when John Worthen served as acting provost is
counted), Campbell succeeded to the second most important position in the
academic life of the university and one that had grown in responsibility since
it was created, without any specific duties, for Allan Colburn in 1950.

Since taking office Campbell has repeatedly spoken of a "commitment to
excellence," which he has sought to support by the allocation of funds both in
respect to teaching and research. In those fields we enter, he has said, we
should seek to be the best or among the best. His supervision of the academic
functions of the university has allowed him to support the appointment of
women and members of minority groups, especially blacks. He has urged a
renewed emphasis on general education, while remaining sympathetic to
interdisciplinary programs. Like President Trabant, Campbell has insisted that
a true university is concerned with the advancement of knowledge as well as
with its transmission, and both men have therefore encouraged the development
of research programs, including many yet to be mentioned.F#19

Another important administrative appointment, made later in 1972, was
that of J. Robert R. Harrison, who came to the university from the business
office of the Reformed Church to serve as treasurer. Harrison succeeded
Randolph Meade, who had held the title of vice-president before his
retirement. The death of Daniel W. Wood, '47, in 1978 led to the appointment
of G. Arno Loessner, '64, to Wood's former post of university secretary and
executive assistant to the president.

The Penrod Report of 1964 had called for reconsideration of the
possibility of starting a medical school in Delaware in fifteen years. As a
step toward eventual reconsideration, the university in 1970 appointed Dr.
William V. Whitehorn, of the University of Illinois Medical Center, in
Chicago, to be director of the Division of Health Sciences and special
assistant to the president for medical affairs. But before Whitehorn came to
Delaware two developments had occurred that affected attitudes toward medical
education.

In 1965 Elizabeth Virginia White, in memory of her late husband, Dr.
Charles Peter White, a Wilmington physician, had left a large sum of money (it
amounted to over a million dollars by 1979) to the university for medical
education, broadly defined; it was to be used in aid of the training of
students preparing for or receiving an education for the practice of medicine
or for medical research. The second development occurred in 1969 when George
Worrilow
persuaded the assembly to set up, by unanimous agreement, a Delaware Institute
for Medical Education and Research.

DIMER, as this institute was called, provided for a cooperative
arrangement between the University of Delaware, the Wilmington Medical Center,
and the Thomas Jefferson University Medical School in Philadelphia. Nine
persons formed its governing board--three from the university, three from the
medical center, and three appointees of the governor. A state appropriation to
DIMER allowed it to finance some medical-related research at the university,
to help the medical center with facilities for clinical work, and to pay a
subsidy to Jefferson for guaranteeing some places in each entering class
(originally twenty places) for qualified candidates from the State of
Delaware. A joint Jefferson-University of Delaware committee, including three
from each institution, reviews applications each year and ranks the Delaware
candidates. A university representative sits on the Jefferson admissions
committee, which makes the final decisions but has customarily followed the
ranking by the joint committee. Annually some Jefferson students come to the
Wilmington Medical Center in their third year--and a few in the fourth
year--for clinical training.

It was originally thought that the DIMER plan might be only a temporary
arrangement while the university developed its own plans for medical
education, and it was on such plans that Whitehorn worked after his arrival in
1970. He drew up a rather elaborate scheme for a joint venture between the
University of Delaware and Thomas Jefferson University. The unique element of
the plan was that it allowed a freshman at Delaware to secure both a
bachelor's degree and an M.D. in six years, using the facilities of the two
institutions. Disagreements over details, however, prevented the plan from
being adopted, and Whitehorn, disappointed, left the university in 1974.

Meanwhile, the DIMER plan worked so successfully that pressure for a
medical school diminished. The original hope that the existence of clinical
training at the Wilmington Medical Center and the upgrading of facilities
there would help draw young physicians to establish practices in Delaware
apparently was realized. The shortage of physicians in Delaware was relieved
at the same time that the DIMER contract with Jefferson assured the ablest
young Delawareans of admission to a good medical school.

The Division of Health Sciences, which Whitehorn had headed and which
had brought together programs in what were called the allied health
professions of medical technology and physical therapy, was joined to the
department of biological sciences in 1976 to create the School of Life and
Health Sciences, which in 1978 acquired a new building, John McKinly
Laboratory, named for a Wilmington physician who was chosen the first chief
executive of Delaware after independence. Short of a huge appropriation of
funds by the General Assembly to start a new medical school it seemed unlikely
that any other major step would be taken toward such a school for at least one
or two decades.

In these same years when medical education was being considered at the
university there was also a movement to start a law school in Delaware. A
shortage of places in entering classes at existing law schools in the late
1960s gave occasion for this movement, and a
man of most unusual devotion to an idea took advantage of it. The man was
Alfred Avins, a newcomer to Delaware in 1970, who had noted the shortage of
law schools and determined to do something about it before the need was
evident to most Delawareans. Delaware graduates with good records had not had
serious trouble getting admitted to recognized and accredited law schools at
the time Avins approached the university with the suggestion of founding one,
probably with him as dean. Neither the university nor the state bar
association, which he also approached, encouraged Avins, but they did look
into the question.

A committee appointed by the bar association reported in September 1971
its tentative conclusion that "it probably would be desirable to have a law
school in Delaware." At the university the faculty senate established an ad
hoc committee, chaired by Edward H. Kerner (physics), to consider the impact
of a possible law school on academic affairs. After considerable study, the
Kerner committee concluded, in May 1972, "that a `broadly-oriented Law
School,' one that related actively with other disciplines, would be a
desirable addition to the University."

Meanwhile, in February 1972, the board of trustees had appointed a law
school study committee, chaired by Justice Daniel L. Herrmann, '35, and
including three other trustees, as well as two university administrators, the
associate provost and the dean of the graduate school. This committee engaged
two men--a faculty member, James R. Soles (political science), and a law
school dean, Willard H. Pedrick, of Arizona State University--to study the
advisability of establishing a law school at the university and to make
recommendations for possible action. They were specifically directed to
consider not only the desirability but also the feasibility, in terms of
finances, of setting up a law school of high quality--and the trustee
committee declared that it wanted nothing less. After considering many kinds
of data and canvassing the opinions of numerous people, especially lawyers, in
the state, as well as outside it, Pedrick and Soles submitted a report in
December 1972 recommending immediate action toward establishment of a law
school--if the university and the people of the state were willing to support
it properly.

The trustees' committee on education and training, to which the law
school committee reported, waited until the spring of 1973 to reach a
conclusion--probably allowing time for compilation of more financial data. On
May 13, 1973, this committee took a decisive vote to the effect that it was
not feasible, in its opinion, to found a law school at the university then or
in the near future. At its meeting on May 19 the board of trustees accepted
this decision.

The cost of establishing a law school was probably the stumbling block.
To start a law school of high quality would mean an initial expenditure of
four to six million dollars for a building, a half-million dollars for a
library, and other expenses; perhaps a million dollars a year would be
required for operating costs. This did not compare with the expense of a
medical school, but still without a source of new funds, this project would
have reduced the university's ability to meet existing commitments.

Avins had very little money and very little backing but he did not feel
the same concern about a quality operation, at least for the early
years. In the fall of 1971, he rented rooms in the Wilmington YWCA, he begged
books for a library, and he himself did almost all of the teaching in what
began as a night school program. The Delaware Law School, as Avins named it,
had trouble getting accredited, and at the demand of students and their
parents, a new dean was brought in to replace the founder, to his chagrin.
Eventually gaining accreditation, the law school became affiliated with
Widener University, which had acquired a campus in Delaware by absorbing
Brandywine Junior College, near Wilmington.F#20

While hesitating to launch expensive new programs in medicine or law,
the university did carefully nurture two existing programs that developed into
graduate colleges, the College of Marine Studies and the College of Urban
Affairs and Public Policy. The College of Marine Studies was the logical
outcome of the marine biology program that began in 1950 and to which other
programs had been added, including marine geology and ocean engineering.

It was 1970 when marine studies became a college under the direction of
Dean William S. Gaither, a civil engineer by training, who had previously been
serving as special assistant to the president for the marine studies program.
The program had already begun to receive federal funding from the National Sea
Grant College Program, and it soon began moving its Lewes operations from the
restricted quarters on Beach Plum Island, where the M. Haswell Pierce
Laboratory had been constructed.

The first move in 1973 was to the so-called Butler Building, a pollution
ecology laboratory erected between the Broadkill River and Canary Creek.
Removal of the principal functions to this place, which could be reached by a
bridge from the end of Pilottown Road, obviated the need for daily boat trips
to the Pierce Laboratory. But soon another site was acquired, 387 acres on the
Lewes side of Canary Creek. This site was intended to provide space for
several functions, including government and private research laboratories and
a conference and information center as well as college facilities.

Thanks to a state appropriation, the Cannon Laboratory was erected in
1975 on this site as the Lewes headquarters of the college (the campus offices
are in Robinson Hall), a research vessel harbor was prepared covering 4-1/2
acres, and a marine operations building constructed beside a dock where the
college vessels are moored. The first college vessel, predating the new
harbor, was the Acartia, a fishing boat adapted to trawling and oceanographic
work. Later acquisitions were the Wolverine, a converted wooden-hulled yacht,
and the Skimmer, the gift of Henry B. du Pont in 1969 and the first new vessel
built for the marine studies program. In 1976 the college put into operation
its major floating laboratory, the new R/V Cape Henlopen, built from private
funds. A unique feature of this vessel is that it is built to accommodate
portable laboratory vans that fit on it as a functional part but can be
removed and used ashore without disturbing any of the scientific equipment or
collections. The vans could even be moved by roads to another site--for
example, to an inland laboratory, if it seemed desirable to continue the study
of assembled materials there.

The College of Marine Studies was successful in attracting research
funds from many sources, including the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration and the Office of Naval Research. In 1976 its
progress was recognized when it received designation as a sea-grant college,
the ninth in the nation and the final step in approval of what the government
agency conferring the award called the "sustained excellence" of the college
in its development.

Two major structures added on the main Lewes campus were the Otis Smith
Laboratory (1980) for the study of marine photosynthetic processes, as in
controlled-environment aquaculture, and the Captain John Penrose Virden
Residential Conference and Seminar Center (1981), built with the help of the
Kresge Foundation and the Pilots Association of the Bay and River Delaware. A
tilting wind-wave-current facility that represented a total investment of
about a million dollars (from the Longwood Foundation and other sources) was
installed in 1979 in a building at Cape Henlopen State Park, which had been a
government defense reservation in the Second World War. The Ph.D. program in
the College of Marine Studies, which offers only graduate degrees, was
approved in 1971, and in the next ten years more than 125 students studied in
this unit of the university.

The other new college of the 1970s, the College of Urban Affairs and
Public Policy, also accepts only graduate students. A decade later in its
initiation than the marine biology research that led to the
marine studies college, work in urban affairs was ten years old in 1971, when
a Ph.D. program in the subject was initiated. A year later, in 1972, an urban
agent's office was opened in Wilmington, with an intentional similarity to the
county agents' offices serving the rural community from Georgetown, Dover, and
Newark.

Indeed, the concept of urban affairs as a functional interest of the
university bears a close relationship to its obligations as a land-grant
institution. The original Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 sought
expressly to serve the agricultural and industrial classes with its insistence
on training in agriculture and the mechanic arts. It was engineering that came
to stand for the mechanic arts in the land-grant colleges, and as the decades
passed it became increasingly a profession. The agricultural work of the
land-grant colleges was kept close to the rural population as a whole by the
development of the cooperative agricultural extension service, but nothing
similar existed for the industrial or urban population.

It was this situation that the university and the Ford Foundation sought
to remedy when the one founded and the other funded the Division of Urban
Affairs.F#21 The urban agent's office in Wilmington, a direct outgrowth of
this historic development, has been particularly directed to the minority
community--that is, the black and, as time passed, the Hispanic community.
Besides this service function, the Division of Urban Affairs continued the
development of its research and teaching responsibilities. When the division
was made a college in 1976 (with C. Harold Brown, trained as a sociologist, as
its first dean), its amended name, the College of Urban Affairs and Public
Policy, indicated the enlarged role it had undertaken.

The college awards three degrees, the M.A. and Ph.D. in urban affairs
and the Master of Public Administration (M.P.A.) degree, the latter in
cooperation with the department of political science and intended as
preparation of candidates for careers in government service. The faculty of
the college has been frequently called on for census surveys of one sort or
another; they made about 200 studies, for government or semigovernment
agencies at various levels, in the last ten years. In recent years, this
college has adopted a new area of interest, a program of technical assistance
and research in connection with historic preservation projects.

While these two new colleges were being established--as well as a third,
the College of Physical Education, Athletics, and Recreation--one older
college lost its status and two underwent considerable internal changes. When
Arnold L. Lippert, the fifth dean of the College of Graduate Studies, retired
in 1976, a governing board was established to consider the future status of
the college. After study and discussion it was decided to give up the college
itself--but, of course, not to give up graduate studies. This college had,
after all, been different from other colleges: it had no faculty of its own;
its faculty were all part of departments in other colleges, and so were its
students. And now there were two wholly graduate colleges, marine studies and
urban affairs, that were separate entities, with faculties and studies of
their own. Consequently a decision was reached to decentralize the
administration of graduate studies, placing primary responsibility on the
individual departments and colleges. A
specific university responsibility for graduate programs and especially their
interrelationships would henceforth be in the hands of a coordinator, rather
than a dean.

In other colleges the changes made in the 1970s were less extreme. The
College of Home Economics changed its name to College of Human Resources in
January 1978, intending by this change to indicate a broadened field of
interest. Besides programs in food science, dietetics, nutrition, textiles and
design, and consumer economics, it offered individual and family studies
covering the life span from infancy to old age. A program in nursery and
kindergarten education was given in cooperation with the College of
Education.

The College of Education suffered a severe enrollment loss in the 1970s
because of an oversupply of teachers for schools that were no longer growing
but actually declining in student numbers, reflecting the lower birth rates of
the late 1950s and 1960s. Traditionally the university had never been able to
train enough teachers to take care of the personnel needs of Delaware schools.
Now, suddenly, the situation was reversed; more new teachers were being
produced than there were jobs to be filled.

One result of this situation was to shift the interest of the college
from its former emphasis on undergraduate training to an enlarged interest in
graduate programs for teachers already in service. Besides many different
master's degrees the college offered two doctoral degrees, the Ph.D. and the
Ed.D. Training for occupational education, for counseling, and for educational
leadership rose to challenge preparation of entry-level teachers for faculty
interest. The undergraduate preparation of secondary school teachers became
primarily the responsibility of the subject-matter departments and colleges,
as it had been before 1945.F#22

Both of the new colleges of the 1960s (nursing and business and
economics) increased their enrollments notably in the 1970s. The College of
Business and Economics became particularly popular because its graduates,
especially those in accounting, could find employment even when business
conditions were generally depressed. Nurses, too, were in demand, but interest
in a four-year nursing program was not as great as in business. Though some
men did enter the College of Nursing, it continued to appeal primarily to
women.

On the other hand, business and economics, once a domain for men, proved
increasingly attractive to women, even after a program in office systems
administration (which had replaced a two-year secretarial studies program) was
dropped. One notable development growing out of the increasing popularity of
this college was an increase in the academic ability of its students. Since
admission to its classes was increasingly competitive, the quality of the
students steadily rose. A graduate program leading to the M.B.A. (Master of
Business Administration) degree also grew steadily in popularity.

The campus activities of the College of Agricultural Sciences, described
in the previous chapter, were centered in the enlarged Agricultural Hall
(renamed Townsend Hall in 1983), in Worrilow Hall, and in the O.A. Newton
Building. Agricultural engineering, set up as a separate department in 1968,
has no graduate program,
unlike the other departments; two of them, plant science and animal science
(which is combined with agricultural biochemistry), have Ph.D. programs. In
1973 construction on the farm of the Louis A. Stearns Laboratory, a beneficial
insects research laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
strengthened the work of the department of entomology. This laboratory had
been founded in 1927 at Moorestown, New Jersey, and remained there for over
forty years. It is the largest insect quarantine laboratory in the country and
cooperates with similar laboratories in France and Korea. Its professional
staff members are adjunct professors in the entomology department.

The Soil Conservation Service provides another connection between the
U.S. Department of Agriculture and the university; in a joint effort the
cooperative extension service has successfully encouraged watershed drainage
projects to such an extent that there were 100,000 more acres under
cultivation in Delaware in 1981 than in 1959, despite the thousands of crop
acres lost to housing and other nonagricultural uses. The cattle on the
experimental farm, heretofore all Guernseys, were increased by gift of a
valuable Aberdeen Angus herd from the Robert and Ellason Downes families.

One of the most popular programs in the College of Arts and Science in
the late 1970s was offered by the department of communication. This department
came into being in 1973 as the department of speech and communications when
the speech programs were removed from the old department of dramatic arts; the
title of the latter department had changed several times and it now became the
department of theatre. The word speech was deleted from the title of the new
department in 1975.

Anthropology and geography departments also arose from the division of
an older department. Anthropology was taught within the sociology department,
at least from 1949 to 1969, though it did not gain recognition in the
department title until 1952. The latter year also marked a union with
geography in what was then called the department of sociology, anthropology,
and geography, a combination that existed until 1966-69, when three separate
departments came into being.F#23

Geography has had a strange history at Delaware. Taught in the Women's
College as part of the elementary education program, it was combined with
geology as an arts and science department in the Carlson era under the
chairmanship of Earl Parker Hanson, a distinguished author of guide books.
Separated from geology, geography entered on a new liaison with sociology that
lasted until 1966, when it became a separate department. Under the
chairmanship of John R. Mather, a Center for Climatological Research has been
established in the department; this specialization has allowed it to offer the
Ph.D. in climatology. Geology, one-time partner of geography, was even earlier
(1971) in developing a doctoral program.

Communication, anthropology, geography, and geology are independent
departments that came into being by the splitting of old departments. Criminal
justice, on the other hand, was a separate program for a time, and then was
joined to sociology. This program arose from two sources. One was the interest
of the police community, especially the Wilmington department, in receiving
training in human relations. Police were being criticized in the 1960s for
misunderstanding, particularly in their relationship to minority groups. To
alleviate the situation some government funds were available, through the
Delaware Agency to Reduce Crime (DARC). The other source was the interest of
Jean Kane Foulke (Mrs. E. Paul) du Pont, who gave the university $400,000 as
an endowment for the study of crime, delinquency, and correction, a field in
which she had long shown an active interest. (She also made annual gifts to
the department of sociology in support of research.)

The first programs set up in the field were conferences and noncredit
courses for the police, organized through Continuing Education. An associate
degree program was worked out after DARC urged the university to give courses
for credit, but very shortly it was decided to make this program a four-year
course leading to a baccalaureate degree. John Kelly, a former New York police
officer who also had United Nations experience and had received a doctorate at
John Jay College of the City University of New York, was brought to campus in
1971 to head what was termed a division, rather than a department. In 1975,
the program was placed, for administrative purposes, within the department of
sociology, where it remains interdisciplinary in composition, employing a
political scientist, a social historian, and social psychologists, as well as
sociologists.

The university acquired its first computer in 1957. Installed in
Hullihen Hall, it was put in the charge of Robert Jackson, a mathematician,
though mainly used by engineers; it is said that Robert Pigford was chiefly
responsible for its acquisition. As successor to Jackson, David Lamb (chemical
engineering) took charge of what had become a Computing Center, now located in
Du Pont Hall, and in 1964 Lamb was also made chairman of a new department that
combined statistics and computer science and was one of the first
undergraduate computer programs in the country. The department and the
Computing Center were both moved to E. Laurence Smith Hall, when that
building, on the corner of South College and Amstel, was completed in 1970,
but the center was placed under separate direction and remained thereafter a
wholly separate organization from the department.

In 1977, statistics, which had limited relationship to computer science,
was moved back to a union with mathematics, where it had been before 1964,
leaving what was now called the department of computer and information
sciences. Master's degree programs are offered not only in cooperation with
statistics, but also with engineering and with business and economics. A Ph.D.
program is also offered in applied science.

The Computing Center outgrew its quarters in the basement of Smith Hall
and moved to a new building constructed for it on Chapel Street, north of the
old Danita hosiery mill, which has become the university's General Services
Building. Another agency using computers is the Office of Computer-Based
Instruction, which operates what is called the PLATO system. Directed by Fred
T. Hofstetter, who came to Delaware in the music department, this project, one
of the first of its kind on the East Coast, was developed mainly through the
initiative of Provost Campbell, who had become acquainted with this system of
computer-assisted instruction at the
University of Illinois, and at first the Delaware system was connected to that
at Illinois.

Beginning in 1977, the department of physics was strengthened by a
cooperative relationship with the Bartol Research Foundation, a division of
the Franklin Institute. The Bartol Foundation had been quartered for half a
century at Swarthmore College, but when the building it occupied was needed
for college purposes it moved to Newark, where it was given space in the Sharp
Laboratory. Carrying on research projects that are on frontiers of progress in
the physical sciences, members of the Bartol staff have adjunct appointments
in physics and do some teaching, largely of graduate students; their research
also provides employment for some students as assistants.

Federal legislation forbidding discrimination on the basis of sex helped
encourage various efforts to improve the status of women at the university.
Despite progress in some details, women had lost standing--for instance, in
the proportion of them ranking as full professors--as Anna Janney De Armond
(English) pointed out in
an article cited earlier. In 1972 a women's studies program was initiated in
continuing education that was later made part of the regular offerings in arts
and science, and in 1974 the Commission on the Status of Women was set up to
promote the interests of women members of the faculty, staff, and student
body.F#24

Perhaps more effective in the long run by providing women with a voice
at a high level of administration was the appointment of Helen Gouldner
(sociology) as dean of arts and science, the largest college, in 1974, as well
as the later appointment of L. Eudora Pettigrew as associate provost. In 1972,
a graduate of the old Women's College, Madalin Wintrup James, '25, was elected
a vice-president of the board of trustees, and when she retired in 1977, she
was succeeded by Catherine Burke Flickinger, '40.

A physicist of German training, Karl W. Boer, fits into the mold of
Kirkbride and Colburn as a faculty member whose initiative opened the way to a
significant new development in the university. It was Boer's idea that he
could employ a cadmium sulphide cell to produce electricity from the sun's
rays, and after experimenting with this idea for several years and winning the
support of President Trabant and the University of Delaware Research
Foundation, Boer became, in 1972, head of a university department in the
College of Engineering that was called the Institute of Energy Conversion. The
institute soon attracted funding from outside the university; the Delmarva
Power and Light Company, for instance, was an early supporter, and so was the
National Science Foundation. Growth of the institute's operation forced it to
move off-campus, first to the Budd Building (once home of the
Continental-Diamond Fiber Company) on Chapel Street, second to an office
building near Limestone Road and the Pike Creek Shopping Center, and finally
to a new university building on a plot of land east of the Computing
Center.F#25

Meanwhile, Boer had to give up direction of the enterprise in 1975
because of his interest in a commercial concern called SES (Solar Energy
Systems). The Shell Oil interests bought this company, to the profit of Boer
and of the university, to whom he had turned over a large block of its stock.
Some of the original expectation of quick commercial development of solar
cells proved mistaken, but experimentation continued. Though the institute was
separated from the College of Engineering, its problems were in great part
engineering ones and it remained close to chemical engineering, with T.W.
Fraser Russell, from that department, becoming director of the institute in
1979. Only one other member of the staff holds a faculty appointment, but
numbers of students work on projects at the institute, which is thought to be
the foremost thin-film photovoltaic solar cell laboratory in the world.F#26

Another university research unit is the Center for Composite Materials,
which was founded as and remains part of the College of Engineering. The idea
for it originated with Jack R. Vinson (mechanical and aerospace engineering).
Vinson secured the support of Dean Irwin Greenfield, Provost Campbell, and
President Trabant for his proposal, and the center was formally inaugurated in
1974, with Vinson as director until he turned the responsibility over to R.
Byron Pipes, of the same department, in 1977. Staffed by
members of the chemical, civil, and mechanical engineering departments, it is
interdisciplinary, though administratively affiliated with the department in
which it originated.

All of the faculty members of the center continue to teach in their own
departments; the center gives no credit courses, though it has offered short
courses for industry and it does involve both undergraduate and graduate
students in its work. Its aim is to find strong lightweight materials,
especially for aviation and space programs and the automobile industry. A
major part of its financial support comes from about twenty companies,
including some foreign companies from France, Germany, and Japan.F#27

The Center for Catalytic Science and Technology is similarly an
interdisciplinary research organization. Founded in 1978, it investigates
catalytic processes that are of importance to chemical manufacturing and
especially to the petroleum industry, and it draws upon the faculties in
chemistry and chemical engineering. Like the composites center, it is a unit
in the College of Engineering, of which its director, Bruce Gates (chemical
engineering) is a faculty member. It too draws most of its financial support
from a group of sponsoring corporations.

These centers and institutes, not all interdisciplinary, demonstrate the
support given to research by President Trabant and Provost Campbell; many
more, like the Center for Climatological Research, could be mentioned, but to
list them all would turn a book into a catalogue. The University of Delaware
Press is nominally older than any center or institute on campus, but in its
present form it is relatively new, for it was reorganized in 1975 under James
M. Merrill (history), who became chairman of its board of editors.

As described earlier, the first University of Delaware Press was founded
by Walter Hullihen early in his administration with the close collaboration of
Pierre du Pont, who financed it, and Everett Johnson, who did the printing at
his Press of Kells. After Johnson's death and du Pont's withdrawal from
support of this enterprise, the press became inactive, though the faculty
publications committee that helped get out Delaware Notes also occasionally
supervised publication of a book with this imprint. In 1949 this committee
began publication of a monograph series, in which Anna J. De Armond's Andrew
Bradford was the first volume. President John Perkins increased the funds
allocated for publishing, and for a brief time cooperative arrangements were
entered into with other university presses, including those of Rutgers, New
York University, and Temple University.

In 1975 the university entered into a contract with the Associated
University Presses, one of several publishing firms controlled by Thomas
Yoseloff, who agreed to publish, at his expense but with the University of
Delaware Press imprint, scholarly books that are approved by a faculty board
of editors, including books by authors who have no connection with Delaware.
These books are printed as a service to scholarship and at no cost to the
university except for the maintenance of an office and miscellaneous expenses.
Adding to the prestige of the university in scholarly circles, the press
assists the university in recruiting able members of the faculty, and in that
indirect manner it also serves the students and the Delaware community
generally.

The service of continuing education to the state is more direct. Over
3,000 students enrolled in continuing education courses in each recent year;
there were many more registrants (over 87,000 in 1976-77) at conferences it
scheduled; and to its other programs of cultural activities it added a
significant new project in 1980--the Academy of Lifelong Learning.

To a degree this project was modeled on the Institute for Retired
Professionals at the New School, in New York City. The idea was that in
northern Delaware, as in New York, there was a lack of daytime cultural
activities for retired people. In Wilmington the university owned a building,
Wilcastle, that had been purchased as a site for evening classes and was not
fully utilized in day. Continuing education secured the service of a former
state senator, Louise Conner, and in the fall of 1979 a membership drive
enrolled about 100 persons.

The academy offered its first courses in the spring of 1980 and quickly
established itself as a miniature university, without grades, credits, or
degrees. Members pay $100 a year for the privilege of taking as many courses
as they wish in the academy, as well as one credit course, if they so desire.
Faculty are not paid, and the program is run largely by a council chosen from
the members. The courses are normally given once a week, either just before or
just after lunch. Students come from varying backgrounds; anyone fifty-five or
older is eligible.

The academy fits into the long-range plans of a Commission on Lifelong
Learning, appointed by President Trabant with the objective of improving the
university's educational service to all the people of Delaware, not just the
retired. As the number of active retired people grows, the academy should fill
an increasing need for intellectual stimulation in a congenial social setting;
certainly the initial enthusiasm it awakened is encouraging to those who hope
the university can extend its service function by helping to fill this
educational niche.

The rapid growth of the university before 1975 and the rapid inflation
after that date strained its financial resources. State financial problems
made the legislature less able to respond to university needs than it had been
in the previous decade, and the university found it necessary to raise its
student fees--to, for instance, $940 for Delaware residents in 1976-77 and
$2,075 for out-of-state undergraduates, with additional charges for room and
board averaging $1,742 for the former group and $1,842 for the latter.
Fortunately, private gifts and income from an endowment listed as $82,000,000
(at cost) helped meet needs.

Among major gifts in the last fifteen years not hitherto mentioned was a
legacy of over $4 million from James B. Eliason, once treasurer of the Du Pont
Company, plus smaller but substantial sums from the estates of Wilmer
Stradley, Eugene E. du Pont, and John F. Metten. Melva Guthrie, a
Wilmingtonian who was known to few people on campus, left over $700,000 to the
library in 1968. The library also profited from the gift of a large collection
of books and papers from Samuel Moyerman and from regular gifts to its
decorative arts collection by Esther (Mrs. Samuel) Schwartz. Wilhelmina Laird
Craven made valuable additions to the Irenee du Pont Mineral Collection, as
well as structural additions to Penny Hall, where it was housed. While the
portion of the collection on display attracts many visitors, the entire
collection is valuable as a teaching tool in geology.F#28

At his death in 1970 Henry Belin du Pont added to his previous generous
gifts with a legacy of $1,500,000. By 1982 the total gifts to the university
from the Unidel Foundation of Amy du Pont amounted to $42 million, the largest
single grant having been for the construction of the Amy E. du Pont Music
Building.

A recitation of gifts made to the university reveals clearly the
generosity of members of the du Pont family and of some former employees of
the Du Pont Company, such as Fletcher Brown, Harry Haskell, Willis Harrington,
and James Eliason. In the summer of 1971 a Ralph Nader study group ("Nader's
raiders"), led by students from Yale Law School, spent several months in
Delaware considering and analyzing the effect of the presence of the Du Pont
Company and family on the state and its institutions. To Delawareans it seemed
that though they were intelligent observers, members of the group spent too
little time in Delaware to understand conditions thoroughly and that they came
with preconceived notions that affected their findings.

In the book that they wrote as a culmination of their work they declared
that the University of Delaware had long been dominated by the du Ponts, to
whom it was, like many of the educational and charitable institutions of
Delaware, a "sacred cow." (An article in Science magazine by Philip M. Boffey
had made a similar argument several years earlier.) They blamed du Pont
domination for restrictions on political activity by the faculty, for the
failure to retain some faculty members who engaged in an anti-ROTC protest
(the Bresler-Myers case), for legislative action freeing the university from
state audits of its private funds in order that their gifts would not be
inspected, for watering down stories about the university in the News-Journal
papers of Wilmington, and for aggravating by their gifts the difference in
resources between the university and Delaware State College.F#29

Officials of Christiana Securities, the du Pont family holding company,
did apparently prevent the publication of some unfavorable news about the
university in the News-Journal papers, which Christiana Securities owned. It
seems probable, however, that this happened at the request of President
Perkins, who was using his influence for what he thought was the good of the
university.F#30 The News-Journal papers were subsequently sold to the Gannett
chain.

Perkins had also attempted to exercise constraint on the political
activities of faculty members, but it was out of a fear that such activities
might endanger the university's state appropriations. He wanted faculty
members to keep out of legislative halls so that the university could speak
with one voice in Dover. After an attempt to prevent political campaigning on
campus, however, he backed down, and since his day appearances on campus have
become
routine for political candidates, particularly since the voting age was
lowered to eighteen. There is no reason to think that Perkins's actions
resulted from any external control. Two faculty members have run in statewide
contests since Perkins's day: James R. Soles (political science), who
unsuccessfully sought a Congressional seat against Pierre S. du Pont IV in
1974, and Shien-Biau Woo (physics), who was elected lieutenant governor ten
years later. In general, what Edward Vallandigham wrote in 1920 to the effect
that partisan politics in Delaware did not involve the university is still
true.

It was the university that was concerned to see that its private funds
were not subject to state audit or supervision. And as to the comment that
gifts to the university aggravated the difference between it and Delaware
State College, it should be noted that it was segregationist sentiment that
was largely responsible for the birth and the continued existence of Delaware
State. The interest and financial support of several du Ponts in the education
of blacks is well-documented.

In fulfilling its role as a state university, Delaware has catered to
the special interests and needs of its constituency, whether chemists or
poultrymen, but its interests are not skewed so awkwardly as suggested. In a
1980 rating of graduate departments, psychology, history, English, and art
history at Delaware rated about as well as any of the science and technology
fields (and better than most) except chemical engineering.

The Nader group also seemed frequently to confuse the Du Pont Company
and the family. While the company did help the university in certain ways,
with a few salaries, with fellowships, with the Upward Bound program, for
example, and although two successive company presidents, Irving Shapiro and
Edward Jefferson, have served on the board, it was individual du Ponts who
were most generous, perhaps moved by a family tradition stemming from the
founder of the family, Pierre S. du Pont de Nemours, who wrote a tract on
education entitled "National Education in the United States."F#31 There is
less reason to confuse the company and the family after 1978 than before
because in that year the company bought out Christiana Securities; the family
no longer controls the company since their individual shares are small and
they no longer can cast them as a unit, as they did through Christiana
Securities.

In the late 1950s, when rural, downstate representatives were in the
majority, the university's needs met a very friendly reception in the
legislature. The general attitude of the state has usually been conservative,
and even at the height of student unrest in the 1967-72 period, the students
on the Delaware campus were probably considerably more conservative than the
most vigorous forms of campus protests made them seem. A real problem in
Delaware in the twentieth century has been the possibility that the
legislature or other governmental bodies might say, "Let the du Ponts do it,"
and shirk their responsibilities, especially in fields such as social welfare
and education.F#32

In recent years various activities of the university have succeeded in
attracting donors from out of state. For instance, the Exxon Foundation gave
$250,000 and the Rockefeller Foundation $175,000 in support of the Center for
the Study of Values, which is based in the
department of philosophy. The Du Pont Company is not alone in recognizing an
obligation to the states where its employees live and where their children are
likely to attend college. Hercules, Inc., for instance, gave the university a
valuable parcel of land that is part of the marine studies complex at Lewes.

The alumni of the university, through annual fund campaigns, have become
increasingly helpful. The separate alumni and alumnae associations were
combined in 1957 and have conducted a joint fund drive for the university's
benefit since then. If alumni in the future show the same interest as Everett
C. Johnson, '99, who secured legislative assistance, and H. Rodney Sharp, '00,
who paved the way for large private gifts, the future of higher education in
Delaware should be safe.

In 1975 and 1976, President Trabant was chairman of a state commission
that celebrated the bicentennial of the American Revolution and of American
independence with various activities, and on campus John Murray chaired a
committee that helped the university community participate in the celebration.
For the university, in an historical sense, however, the most striking event
of the bicentennial occurred in 1976. It was an event that brought its
evolution full circle--the reunion of the Academy of Newark with the
university.

The academy was, of course, the parent of the college that became a
university. The trustees of the academy had raised the money to start the
college, they had let the contract and supervised the building of Old College
Hall, and then they secured the charter by the terms of which the college
opened in 1834. At that time the academy had been merged with the college as
its academic department, and though its old school building had been then
abandoned it was soon found desirable to erect new buildings for the young
academy boys.

In the ensuing years of the mid-nineteenth century the academy was
generally more successful than the college in two senses: it usually enrolled
more pupils and it was better able to make its income meet its necessary
expenses than was the college. Though
the two brick buildings constructed in 1841 and 1842 were deeded to the
college in 1847, the academy was operated somewhat independently under its
principal, and when the college closed in 1859 the academy remained open.

After the college was reorganized and prepared to reopen as a land-grant
institution, its trustees, in 1869, deeded back the academy property to the
surviving academy trustees. These trustees filled all vacancies on their
board, built another brick structure between and connecting the two older
buildings, and continued to operate a school under their 1769 Penn charter for
almost three decades. But free public high schools were taking the place of
private academies throughout Delaware and neighboring states in the late
nineteenth century, and in 1898 the academy trustees decided to give way to
the spirit of the times, closing their academy and renting the building to the
Newark public schools.

After another quarter century, the public high school was moved in 1925
to a new building on Academy Street that was constructed to suit its purposes.
For fifty years more the old academy building met many community needs: it
housed the town library, it provided a meeting place for Boy Scouts and other
organizations, and finally it became the town hall.

It was when a new municipal building was erected on Elkton Road and the
last town offices vacated the old building in the summer of 1975 that the
trustees decided to turn their ancient responsibilities over to the
institution their academy had spawned in 1833, then called Newark College and
now the University of Delaware. At a ceremony on July 14, 1976, the academy
trustees formally turned over to the university not only the academy lot and
building but also its funds, amounting to $71,000, presumably including what
survived of the colonial endowment gathered by agents like Patrick Alison,
Hugh Williamson, and John Ewing from Presbyterians in such scattered places as
South Carolina, Jamaica, Ireland, and Great Britain. Perhaps the $71,000
included a remnant of that royal gift we know came from George III (though we
know no details about it)--if it reached America in time to be securely
invested in land or some other nonperishable before George's army swept
through northern Delaware, seizing the papers and the funds of the academy in
September 1777.

By an agreement with the academy trustees that had been signed on August
15, 1975, the university agreed to preserve the exterior (but not the
interior) of the academy, except that the middle portion, built in 1871 to
connect the two older buildings, could be removed. It also agreed to reserve a
room on the main floor as a museum of early education in Delaware and as a
meeting room "available to...historical societies, civic associations, and the
like." Of the funds transferred, the university was to use at least $40,000
for renovating the interior and $15,000 to establish the "Academy of Newark
Scholarship Fund," the income from which was to be awarded to university
students of scholarly ability, good citizenship, and good moral character,
with a preference shown to those intending to teach, preferably in Delaware.

Actually the university set aside $41,000 for renovation of the
building, $5,000 more for preparation of an exhibit hall inside the main
entrance, and $25,000 for scholarships. The first offices
occupied in the restored building were assigned to the university development
department, and this was quite appropriate. For it had been a distinguishing
feature of the old academy in its stone building on this same site that it had
sent out fund-raisers to far corners of the old empire. These Presbyterian
ministers who went abroad to raise money were not yet called development
officers, but development was precisely their intent. Their appeal, published
in London in 1774, "to the Charitable and humane Friends of Learning, public
Virtue, and Religion," is not very different, notably excepting the emphasis
on the Protestant religion, from the appeal friends of the university make
today.

And the appeal must be made, for other sources of funds are insufficient
to meet the university's needs. State appropriations have fallen to below
one-third of the total expenditures, and the endowment, because of inflation,
brings in a much smaller portion of the total needs than it did fifteen years
ago. One variable that can be made to take up the slack is the fee charged
students, and it has been adjusted upwards. But the university always
hesitates to take this step, for its mission as a land-grant college and a
state university is to be available, which implies to be affordable, for the
youth of Delaware.

Their numbers have shrunk in recent years, as the effects of birth
control have been seen in the diminishing number of high school graduates.
Where once the normal situation was that two-thirds of the students were
residents of Delaware, recently the percentage of Delawareans has shrunk to
little more than half. More out-of-state students have been admitted because
the facilities exist for them--and they do pay larger fees. It is expected
that the percentage of Delawareans will soon rise again, however, both because
grade school enrollments are rising and because the university hopes to
attract, and retain, a greater proportion of Delaware high school graduates.

Some of these graduates who might otherwise go out of state may find the
bill at other colleges higher than they wish to pay. The university also seeks
to help prepare some weak students, usually from poor socio-economic
backgrounds, for success in college by programs like College Try (renamed
Student Special Services) and Upward Bound, which offer special advising,
tutoring, and other support to students believed to have the potential ability
to do college work but who are ill-prepared for it. A special program of
advisement and assistance for minority students has the same aim; all three
programs operated after 1980 as part of the Center for Student Academic
Development.F#33

The university has made a special effort to recruit black students in
recent years in order to avoid any charge of racial segregation. One
interesting program related to this effort is called FAME, the Forum to
Advance Minorities in Engineering, a New Castle County group of businesses and
other organizations that have assisted in identifying potential black
engineering students in junior high school; for selected students this program
has offered enrichment programs in the summer and on Saturdays during the
school year. A number of cooperative efforts have been undertaken with
Delaware State College.

The Instructional Resources Center offers help with classroom teaching
problems, as by furnishing audio-visual aids. The Writing Center and the
Mathematics Center attempt to help students with recognized weaknesses in
these fields. Through the College of Education the university has sought to
improve understanding of computers by school personnel and by students
throughout the state.

In 1980 the university had 139 different undergraduate degree programs,
89 master's degree programs, and 23 doctoral programs. One way in which it
seeks to keep a check on the functioning of this great variety of programs has
been through a Council on Program Evaluation (COPE), established by the
Faculty Senate in 1973. Each year COPE chooses some units of the university to
be evaluated--departments, offices, colleges--and creates a separate task
force to prepare a thorough report on each one. Individual evaluations by
special faculty committees have been required since 1975, more frequently for
instructors than for tenured full professors, but required for all.

Careful planning for the future needs of the university was regularized
during the presidency of John Perkins, when forecasts were frequently issued,
with subsequent revisions as time passed and conditions changed. The Community
Design study initiated by President Trabant broadened the responsibility for
this planning; where it had been the job of a small group in a planning
office, it now became the responsibility of the entire university community.
In 1977 a five-year planning program was begun for all units of the
university, requiring them to state their realistic aims and priorities. An
Office of Institutional Research and Financial Planning was established to
accumulate the factual data needed for decisions about the future.

In the early 1980s, as the university prepared to celebrate the
sesquicentennial of the date when it received its college charter (1833) and
opened its doors to college students seeking a degree (1834), it could look
back on a long institutional history that began ninety years before Newark
College was chartered. Trials and tribulations abounded for more than a
century after Francis Alison opened his "free school" at New London, but from
the first there were lofty ambitions to cheer men on and make them hopeful of
the future.

By the sesquicentennial year it was clear that many if not all of the
grandest ambitions its ablest leaders had held for this institution had been
achieved. To some degree their fondest hopes had been surpassed.

But still many problems remained. Old as the university's history
was--in American terms--there was still a sense of newness about the
institution. Its 13,000 undergraduates had been 9,000 as recently as 1970,
only 2,100 in 1955, and less than 1,000 in 1940. But now the great expansion
in numbers seemed at an end. It had brought great opportunities, but also it
brought trouble and turmoil. The era of growth was now to be succeeded, it
seemed, by an era of consolidation.F#34

But there should be no end to challenges. The major challenge was no
longer to cope with growth but to realize the potential of the mature
university, to maintain what excellence had been developed,
to correct what weakness had been tolerated when the needs of expansion took
priority.

In other words, the problem was to make Delaware as good a
university--for its students, for its state, for its nation--as it possibly
could be.